CALLING

This house has so many alarms:
Washer/drier signaling
the end of their cycles,
the radio breaking on by itself
at six a.m. to wake us.
Pager, telephone,
the smoke alarm which celebrates
our small rejoicings
over steak done just right
on the kitchen grill.
And now, with you away,
I wake to the pulse of nothing
but machines and,
from such a distance, the beep
of your heart.

PANHANDLE

Somebody stands between a wall
and gutter.
He must have slipped
through a crack somehow
to get here like he is.
He doesn't have a face
that you could recognize
or want to call by name,
and you wouldn't be caught
in his tatters.
See, how he holds out his hand.

AFTER 20 YEARS

She recalls the journey:
a plague of sweat along the road,
and no one on the landscape
but themselves. She lived
as a khaki mummy swathed
against the sting of mosquito,
scorpion, snake. Sun packed
in the shadows. Crowds of rocks
whispered the slow thought
of rocks under stars, by day
speaking no more than the man
wrapped up in sand
beside her.

NOCTURNE

Red clouds are settling
into the bowl of the west where night
already washes its dirty hands, the ragged
cuffs of pine rubbed against horizon.
In the dark they're weighing the spoils
of the day, heaping up kindling,
preparing the pot. By dawn
there'll be nothing but bones
and, against the pale
east skyline, a gathering light.

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and also helps her husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field projects. Her poems have appeared in America, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere, and she’s included in the anthology California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). Her latest book, The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press, 2006), is winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.

Email: Taylor Graham

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